“Many of us are destitute … many of us are on medication for stress and depression. Many of us have been rejected by our families, who are ashamed by the allegation of cheating. Some of us have even attempted to take our own lives because we see no other way out.”
The pain in these words – contained in a despairing letter delivered to Whitehall in 2020 – recalls the emotional plight of post office operators caught up in the Horizon scandal. They were not, however, written by Alan Bates, but by a group of international students at the sharp end of another apparent miscarriage of justice – one that has also been hiding in plain sight.
As the Guardian reports this week, some students are renewing attempts to clear their name after tens of thousands were judged guilty a decade ago of cheating in English language tests required for visa renewals. That cheating took place in Home Office-approved test centres is not in dispute. A 2014 BBC Panorama investigation uncovered the use of proxies in two locations. But the subsequent Home Office response – based on dubious third-party evidence, as with the Horizon case – was justifiably described by one immigration tribunal judge as “so unfair and unreasonable as to amount to an abuse of power”.
As Theresa May, the then home secretary, sought to embed her hostile environment policy towards illegal migrants, ministers rushed to accept the findings of a disputed investigation by the US-based provider of the tests. This asserted that 97% of tests taken between 2011 and 2014 were suspect. The robustness of this improbable figure – achieved through controversial voice-detector techniques – was later questioned by both the National Audit Office and the public accounts committee.
Among 35,000 students whose visas were subsequently cancelled was a graduate of English literature and other fluent English speakers who had no motive to cheat in such a basic test. Amid dawn raids, lengthy detentions and more than 2,000 deportations, basic errors relating to biographical details should also have rung alarm bells in government. But ministers and officials were apparently not minded to listen to them. Disgracefully, no formal mechanism was available for students to defend themselves – other than the courts, at ruinous expense.
Along with the Horizon scandal, the echoes of Windrush in the affair are unmistakable. As then, the protests of a group of individuals caught up in a wider drive to lower immigration were treated with callous indifference. Those able to afford it, or willing to risk the debt, are still fighting legal battles against the government. They do so in the hope of proving their innocence to the world at large, but also, in many sad instances, to their own families.
The government should have the decency to belatedly act after what amounts to another example of institutional contempt towards a vulnerable group with little access to influence or power. The conclusions to the independent Williams review of the Windrush scandal criticised a “culture of disbelief and carelessness” at the Home Office, as well as “a lack of empathy for individuals”. The same has applied here.
A review of contested cases, mooted by Sajid Javid in 2019 but then forgotten about, needs to take place without further delay. In a civilised country, ruined lives must not be cynically treated as collateral damage in a bigger political game.